Week 3: Treasure Chest

Everything about game art being new to me, I didn’t know anything about texturing, about working in Photoshop and then applying it to the 3D model, so all of this took a while. At first, it seemed overwhelming, like I couldn’t take in all of the information. There was always another problem waiting around the corner, but following the tutorials I managed to finish the treasure chest and understand the steps of texturing an object.

I first made a mood board to gather some ideas, figure out what I wanted my treasure chest to look like:

 

I set up my solid base and added a brown colour to the background for the padding, since I knew my treasure chest would be made of wood. 

I then started by blocking out the silhouettes of other details and adding some shadow at the base of the chest:

Then the shadow and implied lighting. Besides the fact I had to be careful to not go over the line with my selections, there were no problems with this step, just me figuring out more about Photoshop:

After this, I made the wood texture, starting with diffuse shadows and darkening them, then adding the lighter parts. I had a tendency of going too dark with my shadows, exaggerating them. I was careful to get a new layer every time I was darkening them so I could turn down the opacity if need be.

I then added the details for the metal:

And the colours, using gradient maps. I had problems figuring out how to apply the gradient and it took me a while to understand how it works, which gray corresponds with which colour I applied and so on:

Also, I drew the coins inside the chest separately, then duplicated them to cover the base of the treasure chest:

 

I admit I could have been a bit more creative with my treasure chest, but being new to all of this I first wanted to understand the basic steps following the tutorials and make sure I would finish the project in time.